This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The identity of the man who choked Jordan Neely on the NYC subway has been made public.
The man now gets to become the center of a media firestorm, and will certainly be subjected to credible threats, to say nothing of the likelihood that the activists in charge of Manhattan’s criminal justice system will indict him. If he ever gets to live a normal life again, it certainly won’t be in New York, and probably not in any urban blue-heavy environment in this country. Future prospective employers will know him as the guy who murdered a defenseless man and beloved Michael Jackson impersonator who was experiencing homelessness and needed help. This will be how he’ll be perceived by a substantial number of important people who will have the power to determine important things about the future of his life, regardless of any legal outcomes for him, favorable or otherwise.
I told the story previously of how I was assaulted on public transit by a mentally-ill black lowlife, and how I was very close to being severely injured and nobody in the vicinity would have been able nor willing to stop it from happening. (Sorry, the comment search functions both here and on Reddit are terrible, such that it would be too much work for me to track down that comment thread.) Since posting that story, a very similar situation happened to me yet again - with a predictably similar antagonist - and once again, I was sickened and humiliated not only by the actions of the schizophrenic loser who accosted me, and by my relative inability to effectively defend myself if the guy had started attacking me, but also by the inaction of the other grown men standing nearby. Without telling the whole story, I ended up in that position because I attempted to stop the lunatic from harassing a different guy, and then that guy stood around and watched the assailant menace me and did not intervene in any way.
I have fantasized about doing exactly what Daniel Penny - the NYC subway hero - did. Except for in my fantasies, I didn’t unintentionally end the man’s life due to a tragic and unforeseen accident; I just kicked the absolute shit out of him, taking him by surprise and beating him within an inch of his life, or stabbing him before he could get a hand in me. These fantasies are just that: unrealistic power fantasies, the stuff I would do if I were a much stronger, taller, more physically-powerful, more experienced with interpersonal violence than I actually am. I’ve never been in a proper fistfight, and even if I knew how to properly defend myself, in both this situation and the previous one, I allowed the guy to close distance on me and get into an advantageous position, such that they had me right where they wanted me.
I’ve stewed and ideated about what I could have done differently, why I’m a grown man who let myself be treated like a pathetic plaything by individuals who are my social and biological inferiors in every imaginable way except for that I’m diminutive and even-tempered while they’re large, high-testosterone, and well-acquainted with violence because it’s literally the only tool in their toolbox.
I’ve also thought about what would have been the consequences for me if somehow I really had been able to put these guys in their place and seriously injure or kill them. I’ve imagined being at trial - a highly-publicized media shitstorm of a trial, given the demographics involved - and having to answer questions that are designed to get me to hang myself with their rope. I’ve thought about what would happen if they found my posts on The Motte. If they asked me, “Are you glad that Mr. Schizo is dead?” How could I credibly answer “no, this is a terrible tragedy, I never wanted to take someone’s life” when I’ve got a backlog of posts here saying explicitly that I believe that schizophrenic street criminals’ lives have no value whatsoever and that the world would be better if all of them were summarily rounded up and sent to gulags or executed? If they were to ask me “did you do this because Mr. Schizo is black”, no matter how sincerely I would answer “no, it’s because he was attacking me”, how can I be confident that they won’t drag up all my posts here and paint me as a “hate criminal”?
I have no idea how racially-aware Daniel Penny is. I have no clue if he has similar opinions about the scourge of worthless criminal crazies and what to do about them, and I have no reason to assume that his lawyers are lying when they say that he’s devastated that Jordan Neely died, that Mr. Penny never wanted nor foresaw this outcome, etc. It’s very easy for me to say “I’m glad Jordan Neely is dead, you did the world a favor, this was a wonderful thing you did and you shouldn’t feel an ounce of guilt or sadness about it”, but in the actual event that I did what Mr. Penny did, I probably would be pretty shaken-up about it. For most people, taking a life - especially when you hadn’t planned to - is probably pretty psychologically destabilizing, even if it was totally necessary and justified.
Still, though, what if Penny thinks the same way I do about the homeless population? What if he truly does believe, as I do, that Jordan Neely was human garbage who had no redeeming value, and that his death is a great boon to the entire population of NYC? He can’t say that in court, even if it’s true. He would be pilloried and convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison. His only legal hope is to vociferously insist that Neely’s death is a tragedy, that he would never have done what he did if he could have foreseen that it would result in a death, that he is 100% innocent of the crime of racial consciousness or animus toward the experiencing-homelessness population. His future depends on his ability to persuasively perform colorblind egalitarian liberalism, regardless of whether or not he believes in it or not.
Outside of the edgy dissident-right spaces I frequent, every other commentator, even putatively conservative ones, are doing the expected throat-clearing about how Neely’s death is a tragedy, that we all wish he “could have gotten the help he needed”, etc. If anyone believes, as I do, that the first step to saving our civilization is for tens of thousands of people to pull a Daniel Penny on their local subway-screaming bum, they’re sure not saying it out loud. The veil of self-censorship and paying homage to liberal pieties will persist no matter what happens to Daniel Penny, and nobody will get the public catharsis of hearing a powerful or important person say out loud that Jordan Neely’s death was a good thing and we need more of it. Those who do say something like that out loud better hope and pray that they’re never thrust into a courtroom and asked to defend those opinions under oath; the defense stand is no place for hard-nosed honesty, and neither is our society.
Here you go.
A few weeks ago, in order to get some hands on experience with this whole AI thing, I build a search engine that finds Motte comments by content. It works moderately well, e.g. for the above one, I put your name and "being assaulted on subway" as search query, and it was the top result (neither "assault" nor "subway" actually occur in this comment). When I put the same query and my name, it finds this one. I really need to polish it and publish, it's pretty useful.
Those are impressive search results. You should definitely publish it.
Or not, given how it'll facilitate doxxing / digging up dirt.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This part sounds bad. I am not sure whether you intended it or not, but it sounds like you'd be ok if you were humiliated by you social or biological superiors (wtf is that anyway? More Aryan? More muscular? Longer dick?), but the fact that wrong people assaulted you is upsetting. I don't think it is a very good position.
As I made clear in another comment, this passage had nothing to do with race - I get why people assume that everything is racial in my mind, but actually there are other things I care about as well - and everything to do with the fact that the guy has a massive criminal rap sheet, is homeless and wholly dependent on others, and is a drain on society; also the fact that he has a (currently) incurable mental illness that renders him a permanent danger to other people. He’s a perfect example of someone who needs to be removed from the gene pool, improving the genetic stock of humanity immediately.
As for whether or not I’d be fine with being humiliated by my betters… it depends on the reasons they’re humiliating me in this hypothetical scenario, and whether or not I stand to ultimately gain from it. While I’m skeptical about some elements of the structure and culture of military initiation - basic training, boot camp, etc. - I recognize that the whole “the drill sergeant treats you like dirt and makes a humiliating example out of you” thing has an impressive history of creating an effective fighting force. This would be a scenario where a man is being dominated by his social better, in order to forge him into something improved. He’s suffering a temporary loss in status in order to not only enhance his own status later on down the line, but also to increase the total quotient of effectiveness and status of the group as a whole.
This is markedly different from a situation in which I’m being dominated by my social inferior; it lowers my own status immensely, but produces no corresponding rise in status later on - unless, of course, I respond with force that could get me judicially lynched by a regime that hates me and finds the schizos useful/sacred - and it also immiserates others around me who watch the situation and either feel powerless to intervene, or who have to sublimate the shame of being too apathetic to care.
Would we immediately improve the genetic stock of humanity by killing all the spastics, speds, psychos, schizos and spergs? I think we would destroy it. It is said that the line between genius and lunatic is very thin, because while mental illnesses have many negative effects, they also have positives - most importantly they provide diversity of thought, the only diversity that matters. As a result the intelligent have often been viewed with suspicion throughout history, new paradigms of thought often look like madness to the unenlightened.
Of course this doesn't mean we should coddle the mentally ill or excuse them when they harm others. But doctors are currently hard at work developing treatments for heritable disorders, and with advances in genetic engineering the possibility of ameliorating their negative effects grows nearer and nearer. It might even be the case that society resolves these issues in our lifetimes, meaning no one will have to suffer the adverse effects of conditions like schizophrenia, psychopathy, adhd and autism. Then the mentally ill will be both your genetic and social superiors, instead of just the second.
Because that's another thing you are missing - you might be genetically superior to a schizophrenic hobo, but you aren't his social superior. And you will always be a white nationalist thespian manlet cowering in fear from society's dregs, seething that society doesn't do more for your safety because you can't - you have said as much yourself. So it is possible - probable even given current trends - you will be accosted again. And people don't cower before a social inferior, that's an oxymoron. You wish you lived in a society where people you consider genetically inferior were your social inferiors, but you don't. You live in this society, where you get dominated by hobos.
More options
Context Copy link
Fuck the genetic stock of humanity. Seriously. Our scientific understanding of population genetics is shit anyway, and so is our understanding of brain functions and much else in our bodies. We are not nearly capable of producing any judgement on the level that would allow to formulate some "improvement" programs as a society, and thousand times less as a petty low state functionary who has no idea about these high-minded things anyway. And, the experience shows all the guys that cared too much about genetic purity of humanity were not the good guys, to allow myself a huge understatement. So I think staying away from all talk about "improving genetic stock" is the only way for a decent person to behave. Not with a 100 foot pole.
I didn't say a word about racial and did not assume it. I think this is the case of protesting too much.
You literally asked me if my criteria for declaring someone my superior is “more Aryan”. Don’t pretend you didn’t make it racial.
As for everything else in your comment, I declare unequivocally that the eugenicists were correct, and that what the Third Reich did to Jews was an unforgivable travesty not only because industrialized mass murder is a moral abomination, but also because Jews are a generally high-quality, high-human-capital population. Real eugenicists, of the turn-of-the-century progressive-aligned variety, stayed focused on removing actually dysgenic elements from the population - not via murder, but via sterilization and other non-violent policies - such as the mentally retarded and degenerate populations. The fact that our society marginalized and repudiated them after WWII to retroactively legitimize the Global American Empire was a catastrophic blow to our civilization.
I'm not sure what you think you are getting out of pandering to militant Jews like @JarJarJedi. You ordain the Jews as eternal victims of an unforgivable crime, do you expect any reciprocity or anything? What he cares about is his "shield against the fires of Auschwitz"- and from that hegemonic perspective, undermining the eugenic thinking of your civilization is an indispensable part of that. Seeing it right from the horse's mouth, do you see the problem here yet?
You are of course free to admire the obvious and considerable talents of Jews from an HBD perspective, I do as well, but you should also consider how HBD underpins this dialectic between civilizational order and Jews.
The Hebrew bible is broadly speaking a story of Jewish travelers appearing in conflict among Empires at the height of their power: Babylon, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome... HBD explains this dialectic no less than it explains the human capital component. The tall tale of "industrialized mass murder" in gas chambers disguised as bath houses is not the origin of this dialectic, it's only the most recent continuation of this long story. And that story overtly serves as a bulwark to destroy eugenic-minded thinking of your civilization. That, too, is a consequence of HBD.
The shield from the fires of Auschwitz requires undermining eugenic thinking, or in other words, the promotion of dysgenic thinking. JarJar couldn't make it clearer.
This not only overtly culture warring, it's antagonistic, making it about the poster and not the post.
Even if you believe "Jews gonna Jew because Joos," you can't make an entire argument of "This poster is Jewish therefore he's going to Jew."
If anything, you've gotten more slack than you should in the past because your posts are usually pretty high effort, including the effort you make not to come out and state outright what you'd like done about the JQ. But you can't just wage war here.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes he could. And you seem to be reading a lot into what he says. Without even going into your object-level discussion of HBD, the truth or falseness of which I have no idea of, I think you're making some enormous leaps to your favorite conclusions based on very little, or at least very little right here. Your post, as it stands, reads a little "schizo" - please provide more evidence regarding @JarJarJedi's perspective if you make such strong assertions about it.
JarJar presented the perspective that eugenic thinking is threatening to Jews, "because Auschwitz." That is a direct reading of his post. So JarJar feels existentially compelled to denounce eugenic or racially-oriented thinking for white people- but of course not for Jews, he himself is an ardent ethnic nationalist while he simultaneously denounces that behavior for white people. None of this is unique to JarJar, all components of it are part-and-parcel of an enormously influential contingent of Jewish thinking and cultural influence.
The next premise is that an ethnically-motivated effort to subvert the eugenic thinking of an outgroup is equivalent to a hostile promotion of dysgenic thinking. This is almost tautological, as "you are not allowed to think eugenically, you have to develop your culture and politics around denouncing eugenic thinking" is by definition a promotion of anti-eugenic thinking, which is dysgenic.
My comment recognizes the dialectic between civilizational order and Jewry, which is on the one hand represented by @Hoffmeister25's concern for civilizational health and survival, and on the other hand represented by JarJarJedi's primary concern for the well-being of Jews. JarJarJedi sees these two things in conflict insofar as eugenic thinking is required for civilizational health and survival. Despite Hoffmeister's effort to smooth his concerns it will never, ever work. I've already presented concrete evidence of this dialectic in the form of the Hebrew bible, where Jews always find themselves in conflict with the hegemonic gentile civilization, whether it's Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece, or Rome.
What is Passover? It's the celebration of the Jewish tribal god Yahweh slaughtering the first born sons of the gentiles, after which an exasperated Pharoah expels the Israelites from Egypt. Hoffmeister pays deference to the modern-day replacement for the discredited Exodus story, which is the Holocaust, without seeing the bigger picture: HBD isn't just about the dead horse of race and IQ, it also means taking the Hebrew bible seriously. Those are not just stories, they are myths that emerged from a people and mold the people. I understand JarJarJedi's perspective far better than @Hoffmeister25 does, but in doing so acknowledge that the post-war ideological reformation towards dysgenic thinking that Hoffmeister laments was not accidental, it was planned and it was hostile from the very beginning.
To tie a bow on all this, I'll reference Zygmunt Bauman's work Modernity and the Holocaust. From the wiki description:
From the book (italicized emphasis in original, bolded mine):
It should come as no surprise that Bauman viewed his work and perspective as a continuation of Adorno and the Frankfurt school's work on the Authoritarian Personality, which Bauman criticizes for reducing latent Nazism to a personality type, whereas in his view, it is latent in civilization itself.
When JarJar goes on about his shield from the fires of Auschwitz, this is the context of his thinking and why Hoffmeister's response "well real eugenicists would value Jewish IQ" rings so hallow. They view it as an intrinsic conflict between eugenic thinking - the epitome of civilizational order and rationality, and Jewish identity. This dialectic is not new, the Hebrew bible is a story of these recurring conflicts between civilizational order and Jewry, and this dialectic forms a deep component of Jewish identity.
There's a shorter essay by Bauman, which starts with a quote from Rubenstein and Roth:
Related: Scene from Inglorious Basterds, consider the portrayal of the villain from Bauman's perspective. The villain is an avatar of cultured European civilization, the heroes are the antithesis.
Sorry I did not have an opportunity to respond to your original comment, so I’m now having to reply to your follow-up.
When it comes to the JQ, my stance is that it’s not a Yes-or-No question. There is a whole spectrum of possible approaches to dealing with this very thorny issue. The whole “are you anti-semitic or philo-semitic” thing is a false binary; one can have an attitude toward Jews that is neither wholly negative nor wholly positive.
Regarding the historicity of the Holocaust, I remain persuaded, based on the information I’ve read - including the work of prominent revisionists - that there was a concerted and large-scale effort, carried out by soldiers of the Third Reich and its vassal states on orders handed down from Berlin - to kill large numbers of Jewish people. I agree with you that the specific Auschwitz narrative, with gas chambers disguised as showers, and lampshades made of Jew skin, appears to have been either totally fabricated or substantially exaggerated. I also agree that the “6 million” figure doesn’t seem to hold up to scrutiny, let alone “20 million”. These issues don’t invalidate the central claim, which is that at some point between 1939 and 1945 the Third Reich’s initial policy of ghettoization and self-deportation morphed into a concerted effort to kill Jews. This effort may have been an ad hoc decision made in the heat of a rapidly-evolving situation, rather than some Final Solution which the Reich knew from the get-go that they’d eventually achieve, but either way, I remain persuaded that some limited form of the Holocaust did take place. Assuming this is true, it was an abomination, although it would be far from the first time in history that an invading army with designs toward imperial conquest did something similar. I don’t dispute for a second that you’re more knowledgeable about the minutiae of historical evidence on the topic than I am, and I’m open to having my mind changed in the future; this is my assessment of the information I’ve consumed up to this point, though.
As for how a white advocate and a believer in eugenics should think about Jews and their relationship with gentiles, it’s obviously super fucking complicated. I’ve offered some thoughts on the issue before, and I’m sure I’ll do so again in the future. Suffice it to say, my stance on the JQ is somewhere softer than yours, but that the issues you raise do weigh heavily on me and that my thoughts are still evolving.
More options
Context Copy link
If so, it is very recent attitude, originating in 1960's and 70's, not in 1940's.
Until then, eugenics was seen as uncontroversial progressive and scientific (including by Jews) and militarism, agressive war were seen as the major drawbacks of Nazism.
Nazis were not seen as "pinnacle of modernity", but obscurantist remnant of the primitive past, wanting to retvrn to the Germanic Dark Forest of ancient times.
https://www.takimag.com/article/the_strange_evolution_of_eugenics_steve_sailer/
...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I also asked if it's a longer dick, so let's get into the gay angle too, right? I just enumerated the known definitions of "superior", without having or implying any idea which one is yours. I thought mentioning the dick would be enough to make sure this list is made in mockery of the whole concept, not as a suggestion for it, but of course, it wasn't.
That said, if you are fine with eugenics, I am not sure why the racist angle offends you so much. Even if racist eugenics is wrong (which I am not sure if you believe or not, but it's immaterial) - it's a small wrong. It's like an argument between two theoretical physicists about quantum theory - one may come out right and another may come out wrong, but they both are and remain respected scientists, and their ideas, even is occasionally wrong, would still gain them respect. If eugenics is fine, the only sin of racist eugenics is they get some small details wrong, not that the whole thing is morally abominable.
Again, thanks, but fuck that. As a Jew, I don't want my shield against the fires of Auschwitz to be "high-quality genes", by any definition. Neither I want anybody else's. Either we agree that we don't do "genetic engineering by murdering people" thing (and forced sterilization and other things - which can not be "non-violent" by definition - are only a small step removed from it), regardless of how sure we are we got it right this time (we didn't, we never will) - or we are in the deepest pits of Hell, and no rationalization ever changes that.
Yeah, I remember, the forced sterilization programs and the Nobel prize for lobotomy. Thanks but no thanks.
Also, weren't those the same guys that were super-worried too many Jews are getting into Harvard and Yale? They finally solved that problem, I hear, took them a century but it's done.
I think you're making it a bit too easy on yourself here, though I broadly agree.
The holocaust was bad. (Galaxy brain take, I know.) It was such a humongous bad, and it existed in such a cluster of other bad things, that the entire memetic landscape around it is rightfully considered toxic forever. Nobody should be killed for genes, nobody should be sterilized for genes. But. But. Any child born with a preventable disease is still a stain on humanity's rap sheet! Any person born deaf, or born dumb, or born spastic - we say that such people not just have a right to life but exhibit their own worth, in one of the most blatant instances of sour grapes in the history of civilization. If that was true, why is nobody lining up to have their ears pierced, or their brain lobotomized? It seems obvious that if all other things were equal, you should choose for a child to be born healthy rather than sick, smart rather than stupid, capable rather than incapable. That impulse has enabled and abetted horrible crimes, and we may say that humanity is not capable of safely enacting such improvements, that it gives far too much license to sociopaths and demagogues to advocate disfigurement and naked murder - all granted. But the impulse in itself is good.
Then we can ask further: what of a woman who knowingly brings a sick child to term? Is it a moral good to bring a life into the world that is doomed to an early death? What of a child that is in continuous pain until their untimely but predictable death? If we continue along this line long enough, we either lose the ability to say that a child being born in suffering and doomed to death is morally bad, or we may end up in the bizarre position of "a significant crime is being committed, but we are bound to idly stand by." Fine, be that the case, we may know that granting ourselves license to intercede will only result in worse crimes. But I think we must hold in mind that this does not make the lesser crime a moral good.
A day may come when genetic editing becomes so cheap and widely available that any child can be easily modified before birth to exclude all of those disorders which make life not worth living, or even improve on the human template. When that day comes, I think we do not want to be ideologically committed to the idea that an act of willingly and knowingly creating beings to suffer has inherent moral worth.
Maybe. But that's what makes it so dangerous. And that's what requires the "100 foot pole approach" - we can't trust our obvious instincts to navigate us safely there. It's easy to avoid eating foods that are bad for us and smell and taste foul. It's much harder to avoid eating food that tastes awesome and still is bad for us. We need some special measures to avoid it. Like, not keeping such foods at home at all. Same approach here - exactly because it has a kernel of good in there, we must be extra careful to not let this kernel of good to lead us to the abominable places. Because we know it happened to us before.
Everybody is born in suffering and is doomed to death. The question is just timing. And I'm not sure where one would find the audacity to say they know the "correct" timing to make such kinds of decisions and force them on others.
What of an adult? What if you decide somebody's life is too hard and murder them? For their own good? After all, we are doing so many things to force people to behave in certain ways that they don't want to behave, for their own good. Why not make the ultimate step and murder them for their own good, since we are so smart we totally can decide for them that their lives aren't worth living?
Every human being will suffer. That's the part of being human (excluding Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, I guess, but I don't think you can be born this way?). Again, the question is just the form and the degree. I am all for reducing the amount of suffering, but deciding for another that their life is not worth living because of the suffering is a huge step, which we should be very very very careful about.
I do think there's a fundamental difference in morality between creating life and sustaining life. I don't think that we have a moral duty, for instance, to instantiate the greatest number of barely net positive existences (the Repugnant Conclusion). But to reject it requires assigning special moral worth to beings who are currently alive, which is why there is still, IMO, a moral difference between embryo selection for trait and murder for trait.
And at any rate, if you allow a citizen to give birth to a child whose life is going to be comparatively of much less value - to themselves - than another, you have also made a choice. Inaction is not inherently morally privileged.
Well, sure, I am fully on board with this. I just think that we will grow up to become worthy of this step, and when we do I would like us to have preserved that impulse to reduce suffering and multiply joy in our heart, not snuffed it out.
edit: That's overdramatic, but you know what I mean.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sure... aside from physical damage, would you feel worse about being beaten up by a professional wrestler or a 10-year-old boy? Being dominated by someone weak is even more humiliating than being dominated by someone strong.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think this is OP exactly, but you can imagine a darwinist, or a 'might makes right' person, thinking it's good if someone stronger than him commands him, or even kills him and takes his place. Maybe even as a form of altruist longtermism - if I'm replaced by someone better than me, in a non-self sense, everything's improved! Whereas if you're commanded or humiliated by an inferior, that's just generically bad.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This story has made me revisit my college days and think on how close many kids are to lifetime worries if they aren't just total spineless cowards. We would host parties, from time to time, not ragers on the level of frats (but those obviously exist) and from time to time people who weren't invited, or were kinda shady friends of a friend of a friend would come. Then they would inevitably do some drug other than alcohol/weed and become a crazy person in need of restraint. Typically this never escalates when an average guy is confronted by my roommate (6'5'' pitcher), and if we added in that I was a wrestler, another roommate in BJJ before it was cool, they are easily dealt with. And then they go home.
But one time at one of our friend's place, some crack smoking person showed up and cold clocked a girl. Then he fought and fought and bit at least 3 people until roommate pitcher and I fully submission held him. He attempted to bite me at least 3 times over the 10 or so minutes before the cops picked him up. Could we have killed him? Well, yes, accidentally, as well. Or he could have George Floyded on us and had a dubious possibly drug induced death, possibly aggravated by being placed in a painful restraint for a long time. What to do? Just let people going around socking co-eds? At least the cops slipped me some of those ziptie cuffs as they carted him away...
More options
Context Copy link
In your frustrated rage, you have failed to give as much thought to the pitfalls of authoritarianism as you have to the pitfalls of liberalism. The first step to saving our civilization, at least in the sense that I care for it as a civilization, is not for tens of thousands of people to go kill the local subway-screaming bums. Lock them up? Maybe. Kill them? No.
Life doesn't work like that. You can't just have some kind of society-wide spree of murdering undesirables and find that somehow, all of the things that you actually like about liberal modernity have survived. You aren't going to come back from all of the mob justice with your hands dripping with blood and then just calmly pick up with fairness and rule of law as if nothing had happened. The mob justice will kill innocents together with guilty and, even if you don't care about having killed the guilty, still the innocent will either be on your conscience forever or you will degrade into the sort of person who has no conscience.
The apocalyptic cleansing that you dream of will encourage many bestial things to stir. Your political system will lurch towards being ruled by corrupt strongmen who promise the mob easy solutions. The post-cleansing society will be tempted to solve everything simply. You might find an angry mob on your doorstep not long after, maybe because you have too much money or because you do not have enough, maybe because you know the wrong people or do not know the right ones. You might find some uniformed thugs coming for you one night simply because someone denounced you to the local authorities.
No, we should not allow insane people to roam the subways threatening others. But there are many possible solutions between "do nothing" and "kill them all". "kill them all" might feel emotionally satisfying, but I doubt that you would actually like the kind of society that you would find yourself living in afterwards, and you might not like yourself much afterwards either.
They both have pitfalls, and they both have benefits. The trouble we have right now is excess liberty in the form of an anarchy-tyranny in which people will be punished for defending themselves or others but the public isn’t protected from actual harm. We have a system in New York where you are punished quite often for self defense, where criminals are emboldened to rob people and businesses, and being groped on the subway is common enough that people barely notice it.
But without law and order, without public safety and protection of private property, the credibility of the entire system is diminished. Nobody who sees what people get away with on subways thinks that the cops will protect them. After your first mugging, you don’t expect justice. And as the system keeps losing credibility because it cannot help or protect the public you eventually come to a sort of law of the jungle— where you defy the system and defend yourself and your property yourself outside the system.
More options
Context Copy link
Locking them up is an option for a political entity with a jail and a staff; it's not something an individual can do. Those political entities (the city and state of New York) have chosen to do otherwise. That means the locals either must put up with the subway-screaming bums no matter what they do, or they must use less-measured force. It's a bad situation, but it's certainly not clear that making everyone put up with the aggressive drug-addled mentally-ill violent people is better for civilization than allowing direct action be taken against them.
Are you sure? And even if not, maybe most people would prefer the aggressive drug-addled mentally-ill violent people dead over whatever they lose by that happening... perfection, after all, is rarely an option.
Or, alternatively, they can empower the city and the state to use such necessary force to lock them up. The fact that they haven't suggests that the people would prefer to deal with the occasional nuisance of subway bums than subject them to what they feel are the deleterious effects of "the system". To suggest that individuals should have the power to unilaterally decide to take matters into their own hands makes a mockery of any pretense to having a rule of law. What if a similar mob thought that certain posts on The Motte were inherently racist and not appropriate for civilized society and therefore, since the state and national legislatures have chosen to do nothing, track down the authors of those posts and beat them within an inch of their lives? Would you find this behavior opprobrious? Once you come to the conclusion that individuals and mobs should trump the laws of political entities you disagree with, you empower all such people to act as they will, not just the ones you happen to agree with.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm glad you're defending this line of argument. That said, it's not clear to me that decentralised enforcement of the law is going to lead to widespread violence and vigilanteism. It always amazed me that police forces were relatively rare in both the ancient and medieval worlds, and that was largely due to a combination of collective enforcement of norms and the ability of wealthy respectable private citizens to pay for investigators/private muscle.
I'm not say that's better than our present arrangement, or that it's compatible with the luxury liberalism we enjoy today, but in many cases it worked surprisingly well.
You can have decentralized legal systems, but there still has to be some sort of widespread buy-in (or what we might call meta buy-in, where different groups have their own legal system, but still with some other authority to resolve inter-group disputes, and each group still experiences buy-in from its own members). If you could get that level of buy-in, you could probably just make the city government of New York actually enforce laws, and it would be much easier, and with many fewer nasty side effects.
One example I'd flag here is the Philippines, which amazingly has a lower per capita crime rate than the US and the UK, but which is VERY reliant on private security and community justice. The middle class live in gated communities, private security guards are everywhere, and justice is swiftly and pretty brutally implemented. Here is a really funny scene from the movie La Visa Loca where a British tourist gets his bag snatched by a thief. After he's arrested by private security guards, the British tourist is invited to beat the shit out of the guy before they call the police.
Another example - back when she was a teenager one of my Pinoy wife's friends was sexually assaulted in a Manila club. The next day her brothers and cousins had established the name of the guy, and went to his family and explained they were going to teach him a lesson. The guy's family basically agreed and they fixed the terms of the beatings (e.g., nothing that would leave him permanently disabled). A few hours later a dozen 20-something men jumped the guy as he was leaving work and kicked seven shades of shit out of him. Thus was justice done, and justice was perceived to have been done, and a precedent was enforced in the wider community.
Without researching, this description makes it seem ripe for underreporting.
Family- or clan-based legal systems are viable (David Friedman's book describes at least one), but that still does involve a process. The part where the male family members went to the other family first is really really key. If they just went and did it, without giving the other family the ability to say "I don't think you're correct, this person was out of town last night" it just devolves into a cycle of retaliation.
100% agree. That's what really impressed me when I heard the story. It made it go from the kind of system that could lead to feuding to something like justice by-social-consensus.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This also leads to things like Duarte's War on Drugs, which includes, "In speeches made after his inauguration on June 30 of 2016, Duterte urged citizens to kill suspected criminals and drug addicts. He said he would order police to adopt a shoot-to-kill policy, and would offer them a bounty for dead suspects."
Definitely sounds outrageous to a Western audience, but most Filipinos I know loved Duterte (excluding FilAms with college degrees). None of them felt personally endangered by his policy, and they reckoned it was a success. I'll be honest, despite spending a couple of months in the Philippines most years, I don't have a good grip on whether Duterte 'succeeded' in his war on drugs, because in my time in the Philippines I saw basically zero evidence of drug use except an occasional joint being passed around at a party. Certainly nothing like the zombie hordes of San Francisco or Philadelphia. But culturally, the Philippines seems to have a really low tolerance for substance abuse; I always felt like an alcoholic when I was there, whenever I ordered a third beer and everyone else stopped at two. So perhaps there was a groundswell of support for wanting to aspire to Singaporean standards and nip the problem in the bud?
More options
Context Copy link
Leads to, or results from? I was under the impression the Philippines were high-crime until Duarte?
EDIT: Seems like he halved the crime rate?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
India has pretty low crime, something I would also warrant is due to our extrajudicial punishment.
Thieves often get severely beaten up before the cops get there, and the latter happily turns a blind eye.
Frankly, I trust the community at large to police violent crimes themselves, having your ass handed to you makes your bad life decisions much more poignant than a stint in prison, especially for scum with low time preference.
The last argument is one for corporal punishment over prisons, not for mob justice.
And the big issue with mob justice isn't that thieves get beaten up, it's that sometimes the person getting beat up didn't actually do anything except be an outsider and look funny. Or more generally, that the less formal the mechanisms of justice, the more they become about social standing. India does keep popping up in international news about various gangrapes and coverups thereof because the rapists are friendly with/members of the police, which is enabled by the same mechanisms that enable your beatings.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know about the ancient world but the upshot of this was that in the medieval world the murder rate was ridiculously high by modern standards. I remember reading one article that estimated the murder rate for Oxford in the 14th century being well over 100 per 100,000 people while New York City at its most dystopian never cracked 30. Estimates of the overall American murder rate dropped from over 30 in 1700 to below 8 in 2020. By comparison, only the 5 most violent Mexican cities even approach the medieval Oxford murder rate, and the 1700 US rate is comparable with modern-day South Africa. The best that can be said about historical eras when law enforcement was decentralized was that it wasn't any more violent than the most violent places in the modern world, and that seems like damning with faint praise.
A huge confounder now is omnipresent surveillance. With cameras on every doorstep, every vehicle dash, every corner store, etc., it's bloody difficult to physically move to a place to murder someone without a camera catching you, your car, something. It's not always enough, but it is absolutely an incredible deterrent, at least to people who have other "regular life" equities that are a least a little bit important to them in comparison to the prospect of going to prison for most of the rest of their life.
I also wonder if the rise in surveillance is actually contributory to the rise in mass shootings. This is a completely fresh thought for me, so I'm just sort of throwing it out there. (Also, it's a small percentage of the overall issue, so the whole rest of this is pretty much just an aside.) The initial thought is just that omnipresent surveillance probably makes it vastly more difficult to be the type of serial killer we had decades ago (and presumably long in the past, too). You just can't bank on being undetectable by, like, picking up random victims at highway rest areas or whatever. Those rest areas have cameras now. The highways have automated license plate recognition, and they can correlate plates that were on the road near multiple incidents. Cell phones are constantly telling the telcos where you are, and that will also correlate you near multiple incidents. You can probably start trying to scheme your way through each one, but there are more and more and more. Many pieces of data, and you'd have to be incredibly meticulous to work your way through each problem in order to rack up a big body count over an extended period of time.
So, if you're a wannabe serial killer, but it's just too darn exhausting to think through how you can pull off more than a few before getting caught by the panopticon, maybe you just get funneled toward not doing it over an extended period of time. You don't do them individually, carefully, one-by-one, always hoping to not get caught on the next iteration. Instead, you give up on observability and simply try to get all your desired killing in as quickly as possible in one big streak.
In any event, I'm not sure we've experienced a combination of panopticon with decentralized law enforcement. Would probably result in some weird incentives.
CSI (and its later offshoots) unambiguously communicated to everyone alive at that time (everyone watched it or knew someone that did) that every police department had Sherlock Holmes capabilities.
Yeah, "zoom and enhance" was bullshit at the time, but people were largely ignorant of computer capabilities at the time (being that this was also pre-cellphone) and that was only a small part of the claimed capabilities of forensic science. And now those capabilities are increasingly the reality, so you get things like 1980s serial killers getting found out by DNA data they never even submitted.
As a bonus for the new "parallel killers", you're guaranteed to be on every newspaper (TIME magazine made the Columbine killers a household name), your manifesto (or supposed manifesto) will be paraded around, and everyone in the nation will freak the fuck out.
We haven't quite figured out how to deal with that yet, since renting a truck and driving into a bunch of people is even easier and deadlier than guns are (the recent events in Texas should show that pretty clearly), and the fact that these acts are also fundamentally suicides complicates things even further.
Personally, I think we already hit upon the solution in the 70s and 80s with movie plots portraying 21st-century blood sports. It'd be a radical solution, of course, but if we can offer someone a guaranteed 15 minutes of fame and (the chance) to kill people for shits and giggles while at the same time crowding out the media attention current parallel killers receive I think it'd probably depress their numbers. Might lead to some really weird incentives, though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Absolutely fair, but obviously hard to disentangle cause and effect here; the medieval era was desperately poor and ideologically fanatical by modern standards with an incredibly poorly educated population. I guess my main point was not that private justice systems are necessarily desirable from a niceness and human civilisation point of view, but merely that there are indeed stable equilibria involving them that don't immediately turn into the war of all against all. Also note Scott's discussion in his NRx explainer post about the bizarrely low crime rates in Victorian England that existed alongside high poverty and very low per-capita policing.
His first source is moldbug quoting some text where a guy just says something like 'We are secure, without crime! You can go out at night without anything bad happening', without much attempt to back that up! Elsewhere on his blog, moldbug has cited some other old texts that say similar things, but never any data, and ... firsthand reports of the vibe of a place like this are often wrong.* Scott then goes on to cite English crime data, and he just doesn't pick a graph that goes back far enough, even back in 2013 there were studies saying pre-1900s english crime rates were high.
*This is one thing I worry about with him, especially in the areas I agree with. He's reading a bunch of old books, coming to rather unusual conclusions, and then synthesizing that across hundreds of (area, period) combinations. It's really easy to make mistakes while doing that, as ... almost every failed grand narrative historical synthesis ever attests to. And I haven't seen many attempts at criticizing his ""historical scholarship"" either - which, if many existed but were bad, would make the claims more plausible.
To your main point - it's def correct that such equilibria exist, but even in your example, the process didn't seem to discriminate too much between 'the accused did something wrong' and 'the accused did nothing wrong but we have social power and want to beat him up'.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, but as well know from British period dramas like Bridgerton the black share of the population was much higher back then and that it explains crime rates /s
Low effort + sarcasm isn't a productive way to join the conversation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This only follows if governments run perfectly and have no principal/agent or other problems that prevent the will of the people from working.
And that only follows if there is broad public consensus that some people are human garbage who are undeserving of basic rights and that violence against them should be ignored provided it's executed with some broad excuse of having the "public interest" in mind. Something tells me that no such public consensus exists.
That's the case in India, and looking around, I don't see anything particularly wrong with the state of affairs when it comes to policing of violent crime or theft.
Seriously, you Westerners are spoiled, society doesn't breakdown overnight when common people beat up thieves, thugs or miscellaneous dirtbags, no matter how much you wring your hands afterwards.
Does it break down totally? No. Does it make it an undesirable place to live? I don't know, weren't you extolling the virtues of London a while back because you could walk down the street with your girlfriend without drawing the opprobrium of the community? I can't imagine how little it would take for one to be considered a "miscellaneous dirtbag" and thus subject to senseless beatings.
Once again, you're severely miscalibrated it you think a couple walking down the street is at any real risk of harm.
India itself supposedly frowns on PDA, yet my girl and I have gotten away with quite a bit.
There really are stable equilibria between anarcho-tyranny and fascism, and one would be that assholes committing significant crimes get their asses handed to them, while otherwise benign behavior or very mild offenses don't cause a ruckus.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you actually believe people have an obligation to respect iniquitous laws? Do you feel like a revolutionary when you jaywalk? The law is just a crude model and reminder of morality, of course it yields to it when they conflict. If I get to decide how everyone should act, I ask that they behave morally, not legally.
According to you, this is the reasoning of an antifa: ‘Man, it would obviously be the right thing to do to beat up those fash motte guys, that would really help the oppressed. I don’t care about the danger, or going to prison. What really stops me is the unspoken contract not to do anything illegal. My hands are tied because my enemies respect all the contracts between us. I could never knowingly break the rules of this in no way corrupt system I admire. Etc etc. ‘
Is your argument here that homicide laws are iniquitous?
Was your argument not that people should obey the law regardless of other considerations, lest it mean the end of the rule of the law, and possibly your own death?
Okay, you asked first. Yes, they are iniquitous.
Iniquitous in what way? How would you rewrite the homicide statutes to correct whatever iniquity you find there?
Those guys should be institutionalized for their repeated violations, but since they are released as soon as caught, it requires the creation of a new legal category to accommodate their deplorable presence in the public sphere: Let’s call them Prisoners on Parole.
“When robbed or assaulted by pops, citizens and cops may use all the force they deem necessary. “
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, they can't. Demonstrably. Political systems turn out to be really hard to change by voting, since a vote both has little effect and that little effect covers a whole host of issues.
Your analogies miss on many salient points.
As I stated in another reply, you're operating from an assumption that there is broad consensus for the changes you seek. If that were the case, and it was only the pesky legislature whose intransigence prevented the necessary legislation from passing, you may have a point. But I doubt there's any social consensus to put a "the guy was a piece of shit" exception into the homicide laws. And even if there were, this is the system we have. If you think our system of government needs reform, then I'm all ears to you suggestions.
There's broad consensus for not wanting aggressive drug-addled mentally-ill homeless people in the subways. But you can't vote just for that.
But there's broad consensus against OP's implied solution.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't the point here that the law enforcement system is too EASY to change by voting? Your DA's are politicians first, they get elected by people who are "soft on crime" therefore they are "soft on crime". Which they should be, if that is what they campaigned on.
Its not too difficult to impact law enforcement politics, its far too easy. Its too responsive to the whims of the public.
No. Voters not paying enough attention so dedicated activists can elect soft-on-crime DAs is part of the problem, but only part. NYC has been doing nothing about the problem for far longer than Alvin Bragg has been in office.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Indeed, the graceful losing will continue as long as mainstream conservatives keep playing by the left’s playbook and agreeing to their terms.
There are only two tragedies here. One is that the hero’s getting his name dragged through the mud and facing social and legal harassment for taking out the trash. The second is that there are far too few subway vigilantes in the world, and far too many “Michael Jackson impersonators” terrorizing public spaces. The Subway Marine should be honored, just as Rooftop Koreans should be honored, and become a celebrity spokesman for the sandwich chain. SubwayTM: So much sandwich that you might choke.
An amusing thought that comes to mind: If, ex-ante, I were told there was a viral video of a military member grappling with an NYC subway hobo, I’d immediately guess Marine. Like, it’s much harder for me to picture an Airman, for example, doing something as based and gritty as this. Chad Marine vs. Virgin Airman. It takes a special kind of guy to be willing to grapple with a gross hobo or on an NYC subway floor (much less the two combined), such as the kind of guy who’s down to crawl around in shitty, muddy water while in gear. I’d have to take a chem-shower after hobo-jiu-jitsu on a subway floor, or get myself hosed down like the mother in 28 Weeks Later (possibly while sobbing like her, too).
That’s seriously brave of you, particularly since you’re a self-described smaller guy who’s never been in a “proper fistfight.” I’ve thankfully never had to confront or defend myself against such public transit creatures (Creatures of Public Transit?). Especially since, in recent years, I’ve made it a priority to live in areas with less vibrancy. As a (still) young athletic man with some familiarity in fist fights, I’m mashing RUN rather than FIGHT each time a WILD HOBO appears. Too bad there is no irl REPEL for low-lifes that I can keep in my ITEM stash.
Defending yourself against people with much less to lose than you is really a lose-lose situation, especially given Who? Whom? considerations. It’s not like wild hobos fight fair under unwritten gentlemen’s mutual combat agreements. A self-defense situation with a crazed hobo could get you killed. Or perhaps worse, it doesn’t.
If I stand my ground against a hobo and lose, I just got my ass kicked or killed by a hobo who then just returns to his life of doing low-life things. Great. I might be stabbed, seriously injured, or dead. Who knows what a deranged person might do to you after you’re incapacitated. Onlookers don’t help due to fear of personal injury or fear of being accused of bigotry in one way or another.
If I win the fight, I get the full-force of anarcho-tyranny coming down upon my head. I’d get hunted down and socially and legally prosecuted, my name smeared while the hobo has hagiographies coming out about how he is/was a gentle soul who loves/loved putting smiles on people’s faces, and was just having some mental struggles after his mom died until some bigot lynched him in a subway (an experience akin to a certain Marine might have recently had). If a shadow-realming occurs, my devices would probably be seized, where it’d possibly emerge that apparently I’m an extremist who somehow masqueraded for years as a typical member of the PMC while sometimes commenting in a hive of scum and villainy filled with racists, misogynists, White Nationalists, Russian misinformants, etc., which would only serve as further proof to my supposed guilt.
Maybe my fantasies are more boring, but when I was living in a more… vibrant… area, my fantasy was that one day I’d move to a place where I wouldn't have to deal with the Neelys of the world as much. And now, my “fantasy” is that perhaps Anglosphere/European countries will just enforce their laws, and stop letting in and stop subsidizing people, inside or outside their countries, who will only increase the Neelyness of their country and/or the planet.
This literally exists, it's called pepper spray. Unless it's illegal where you live.
Regardless of its local legality, a key difference between pepper stray and the fictional REPEL (and REPEL's upgraded forms) is that pepper stray is something you pull-out in the moment—if you have time to do so—while a WILD HOBO or whatever attacks you. Whereas REPEL prevents WILD HOBO attacks altogether in the first place (at least from those lower in level than you).
I guess I got nothing for you, then, other than smearing yourself with concentrated essence of durian.
There is some precedence in the zombie genre of something like that working, caking yourself with mud/shit/[stinky substance] to sneak by zombies.
And hobos are basically irl zombies, dangerous single-minded animated corpses in varying stages of rot and decay. There are slow and fast kinds, and they can be inhumanly strong and determined for they lack normal human restraint and self-preservation. If an encounter unfortunately arises, sometimes they’ll leave you alone if you don’t make any noises or sudden movements, but other times you might just be SOL and have to defend yourself. It’s over if you get bitten by one. A hobo bite would cause massive poison damage on top of physical.
This is not a productive or helpful way to contribute to the discussion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That just makes you smell like the bums, it likely won't repel them.
More options
Context Copy link
That's called BEING RICH which comes with the LIVING IN A NICE NEIGHBORHOOD buff. But that's sadly a P2W item.
SMH, all of Life seems to be one big P2W scheme...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Killing human garbage of this sort is doing them an act of mercy they do not deserve. Beating them to within an inch of their lives is absolutely the morally correct choice here. Their lives are already not worth living, and making them continue stew in the suffering of their own making is small recompense for the suffering these people inflict upon other human beings. And before I am met with the refrain of "who are you to decide that another human's life is not worth living" know that I have the same conviction in my belief that these people's lives are not worth living as I have that the life of a battery hen is not worth living, save that at least a battery hen has a positive overall impact on the world.
To get Kabbalistic for a moment here, it is only through the harsh judgement of Gevurah towards those who are undeserving that the light of Chesed (mercy) is revealed. Unconditional mercy towards all merely condemns the innocent to suffer at the hands of the wicked. It ceases to even be merciful unless the restraining force of Gevurah is there to guide it. Here in this case it is the very policies of "mercy" towards the lumpenproles that is destroying society as well as in a cruel twist of fate hurting them too, for these people would almost all be better off inside an insane asylum.
Your post got some reports of "antagonistic", probably for the first sentence.
I get that you have strong feelings, but assigning people to the category of "human garbage" is antagonistic, and should be treated as a thing that needs to be carefully argued about. I think the post as it is runs afoul of two of the engagement rules:
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You have my sympathy for your experiences with the mentally ill homeless, but you are still being played by the media. The media are calling him schizophrenic as part of their campaign to paint him as innocent, not just because he is out of his mind and might not be cognizant of right and wrong, but also because schizophrenia is a mental illness characterised by a break between the mental model of reality and the factual model of reality and by slowed thinking and lowered motivation. However you can find a doctor who will diagnose just about any man with disordered thinking as schizophrenic, even if they have taken drugs known for causing psychosis, like Neely. Bam, instant sympathy. You would be better off using words like psychotic, or just the usual crazy, lunatic, nuts, bonkers etc
Tldr: schizophrenics are often losers yes, but they are rarely if ever violent and you should not be afraid of them or angry at them, or lump them in with other insane people riding the subway, aka New Yorkers.
Well..schizophrenics are not particularly violent.
An average white schizophrenic is about 10x* as likely to harm another person than a random white person.
Whether in blacks this is multiplied with their basic 10x homicidal propensity is unknown to me..
*According to data on a Finnish sample of
1500 homicides of which90 were committed by schizophrenics..I think that this is unfair. First, because the black homicide rate is not so high as 10 times that of whites. Second, because the vast majority of the homicides committed by black people are committed by a very small subset of black people that moves up the entire race's averages. I guess you could argue that the existence of that subset is an indicator that the entire race has some sort of elevated homicidal propensity, but the way that you put it is simplistic.
It's about 7.2x that of non-blacks, assuming 13/52.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is slightly off topic but the picture at the top of that article caught my eye. I count 7 people holding signs in two rows. The photo looks like it was taken from a couple of feet in front of the first row, so these 7 people fill pretty much the entire frame. There's one other man in the background but he's some distance away from the protestors and not holding a sign so I assume he's a bystander and not taking part. If you scroll past it quickly it's easy to assume it's of a sizeable protest and not just a handful of people. The author doesn't state a figure for the size of the protest anywhere in the article.
Later, the article says:
Which again, makes it sound like a serious movement. I think if there were actually widespread protests by more than a handful of people then it would have been simple to take a picture of them, from a distance and angle that shows their approximate size.
I think the Guardian is intentionally trying to mislead people into thinking these protests are larger than they are by photographing them in a misleading way.
The local (1010 WINS all-news station) radio news claimed about 15 protestors outside Bragg's office on Thursday. Not only is this not a popular movement (none really are, I suspect), but they can't even get the astroturf to grow. You've heard the one about a conservative being a liberal who has been mugged? In this case, it's "a liberal who rides the subway".
What are the odds of Bragg ignoring the silent yet blatantly obvious majority?
My guess is he takes it to a grand jury so he can avoid responsibility, but whether he pushes for a true bill or angles for a no-bill I don't know.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’ve had similar experience of low life I felt bad for assaulting people on train. It was actually Easter I was going to airport so felt particularly bad for him. He threatened old guy as easiest target with family. The assaulter looked young so felt bad for him but I would never take away our right to defend ourselves.
For the guy who ended up contributing to low life death I’m fairly certain he’s got a job offer as Desantis personal security. (He doesn’t but if he asked I’m sure Desantis would say yes).
I think it's a bit too early to nominate DeSantis to the position of "you've got to mention him if anything bad happens even if what happened has absolutely zero connection to him", which is currently occupied by you know who.
If you want him to win you need to start including him in every post in order to beat you know who.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
deleted
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Surely respect for life, and charity towards those who are ill, are consistent with conservativism, are they not?
With traditional Christian-values inspired conservatism, yes. But most conservatives here are of the Nietzschean post-Christian kind, which is much less fussy about the sanctity of life and much more comfortable with humans differing in intrinsic value. And yet even people in the second camp have to make the proper prostrations to liberal pieties.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Anonymity with respect to other internet users and anonymity with respect to law enforcement after you've just killed someone, who'll physically possess your electronic devices and subpoena your ISP and every internet service you've ever used are different! I doubt he, or many here, have it in the second sense.
You could be smart about it and just use TOR. Keeping records there isn't as straightforward, and it'd be really interesting to know if feds somehow connected years old posts to a certain IP.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Saying that society should recognize that these people are garbage and not give a damn about them is a position that can only be taken if one is very selective about whom this categorization refers to, and this selectivity is why activists protest and call opinions such as yours inherently racist, or classist, or whatever. When Mr. Penny decided to put Mr. Neely in a chokehold, his information was limited to what he could tell from the approximately 30 seconds or whatever it was that Penny observed him in public. He didn't have a copy of the guy's criminal record to know that he was a general homeless scofflaw who had been arrested 42 times previously, mostly for turnstile jumping and public drunkenness but at least four times for assault. All he knew was that the guy was ranting and raving about being hungry and not caring if he went to jail and that this behavior made some (most?) people around him uncomfortable so he decided to do something about it, or, more accurately, assist in a group effort to do something about it.
Giving him a free pass on this seems reasonable enough, but only because we have the additional context that this was a black, homeless, schizo, ne'er do well. Suppose, on the other hand, a white, middle-class, student at a prestigious university (possibly your son) got drunk and started making a scene on public transit. A group of black passengers were made uncomfortable by his behavior and the young man died after on of these passengers put him in a choke hold. When I was in my early 20s being drunk, loud, and obnoxious on public transit was a regular occurrence, as we could go to the club in the city on 50 cent drink night without having to drive or park. Just a few years ago a friend of mine went into a similar rant about Taco Bell on the train back to the hotel after the 2018 ACC Championship Game in Charlotte. And if the counterargument is that Neely was obviously a dangerous hobo then that just confirms the suspicions of all the social justice do-gooders that you expect the rules to be different for certain people, and we're supposed to expect people to be able to tell the difference based on the way a guy's dressed or whether we think he's mentally ill or homeless or, mast damningly, whether he's white.
I remember a similar storyline back when black guys getting shot by cops was in the news more often, and most of the conservatives I know kept pointing out that one has an obligation to obey when a police officer tells you to do something. As a guy in his '30s this seemed reasonable, until I looked back at my own life and realized that by these people's standards I'd have been dead a long time ago. Yes, I agree generally with the argument that if a police officer decides to arrest you then what happens afterward happens on his terms, not yours, and if you have a problem with that you can bring it up in court. On the other hand, any teenager who is told to stop by police is going to start running. I wasn't a bad kid by a long-shot—I only got two write-ups in four years of high school, and one was for a class cut—but I still liked to occasionally indulge in the kind of mischief kids indulge in, like drinking in woods of indeterminate ownership or stealing pumpkins from farm fields and shit like that, and this would sometimes end with a fat, black cop chasing a bunch of spry kids through fields and woods. I once got away because I crawled under a fence that the guy couldn't fit under. If we took these statements about a duty of compliance to their logical conclusion, the officer had every right to shoot me. After all, I had clearly committed a crime, ignored his orders and fled. And it was clear that he wasn't going to catch me unless he could stop me from a distance. And this was for the same type of "quality of life" shit a lot of law and order types are complaining about. How would you like it if property you paid for was being used without permission by people on quads and dirt bikes during the day, cutting trails you don't want, contributing to erosion, and scaring away huntable animals, and then at night the same kids would come back and build fires and leve beer cans and fast food wrappers everywhere? People in rural areas have gotten in trouble for putting up tripwires and spike strips and other kinds of booby traps to keep people from trespassing, and while there's some pushback it's understandable that parents get pissed when criminal trespass results in serious premeditated injury. If we develop standards they have to apply to everybody, and few people realize what the implications of this would be.
He did not have every right to shoot you, and odds are he was well aware of that, since using deadly force to subdue a fleeing criminal has been unconstitutional for almost 40 years now and police academies across America teach this to every class. The only instances in which using deadly force to subdue a fleeing criminal is permitted is when the officer has a reasonable belief that the criminal poses a substantial threat to someone's life.
Posts like this exemplify the dishonesty in all discourse surrounding black crime and the consequences imposed upon it. Hardly anyone is shot because they were running away from the cops. Many (most?) cases involve people who were actively attacking the cops, like Michael Brown, or attacking someone else, like Makhia Bryant. Breonna Taylor was shot because her drug dealer boyfriend opened fire on the cops, and they fired back. These are experiences far removed from the lives of the white libs who do this "Aww shucks, who didn't do a little horsing around when they were kids?" routine, and yet there is always this pretense that it could happen to anyone. Have you ever charged a cop and tried to steal his gun? Have you ever picked up a knife and tried to stab someone? Have you ever dealt drugs out of your apartment, or lived with someone who did? If not, why pretend the law and order types aren't in touch with reality?
I wasn't discussing the actual law, I was discussing the rhetoric from conservatives in my social circle that suggests that a cop has the right to do anything to force compliance. In any event, the case you referenced states that they aren't allowed to use deadly force unless "the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others." In practice this isn't a particularly difficult standard to meet. Recall the Antwon Rose shooting where the officer shot a fleeing suspect and was acquitted by a jury with three black jurors and a black foreman. In an attempt to quell protests that erupted in the wake of the verdict, the foreman went on local television and explained that the law gives police wide latitude in these situations and changing that law is the job of the legislature, not a criminal jury. While my own underage drinking experience probably wouldn't fall into that kind of situation, the Rose case was pretty big here and most conservatives defending the police were of the opinion that anyone who ran deserved to get shot, and I used my own experiences to push back against this argument.
Again, Antwon Rose was fleeing from a police stop of his car that had been used 10 minutes prior for a drive-by-shooting. Under those circumstances, the cops had every reason to believe the inhabitants of the car posed a significant threat to the lives of others - they had been shooting at people just 10 minutes ago! You have absolutely no experiences that are even remotely similar to this! Why keep up this "There but for the grace of God go I" act?
Because, again, it's not about the actual circumstances but about the rhetoric. In the days after the shooting it wasn't known that the police officer in the Rose case pulled the vehicle over based on anything other than a vague description, and it certainly wasn't known that Rose was involved in the actual shooting. The protestors made it seem like the kids had no idea why the vehicle had been pulled over and simply ran out of instinct when confronted by the officer. Conservatives at the time said that, even assuming that the protestors' account of events was true it didn't matter; by virtue of having deliberately disobeyed the orders of a sworn officer and run the kids were tempting fate. Same thing with the George Floyd case—the guy was in custody, unarmed, restrained, and not going anywhere, and again some people acted like the officer should have been given carte blanche because Floyd wasn't 100% compliant. I din't have any disagreement with the Rose verdict once the facts came out, but some people simply said facts be damned, only criminals run from the cops. That's what I'm arguing against.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Correction: Have you ever dealt drugs out of your apartment, or lived with someone who did, and also had a DEAD BODY in your car?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Have you ever actually lived downtown in a large city with a substantial homeless population? You can identify this class of homeless person by smell from an entire subway car away. And the ranting really isn't the kind of thing you see with normal wasted people. None of this is really to say that I endorse the more extreme points of the previous poster but lets not play dumb, your average city dweller is not mistaking normal drunk people who happen to be black for the belligerent homeless.
More options
Context Copy link
Do you think most people would be capable of using that 30 seconds of observation to arrive at an educated guess regarding Mr. Neeley's criminal history that would line up fairly accurately with his actual criminal history? If so, are they morally obligated to register that prediction as purely prejudicial and push it to the back of their mind, internally insisting to themselves that it has no predictive value?
Even if it has predictive value I don't see what the point is. Either people causing disruptions that make the general public do so at their own risk of consequences up to and including death if anyone feels the least bit threatened or they don't. Even if someone can make an accurate predication about another person's criminal and mental health history we have to establish criteria under which he can operate. Do we really want to go down the road of defining how many arrests it takes before someone is legally considered scum and forfeits basic civil rights most of us enjoy? And what happens if someone's wrong? If Neely was really just a normal dude dealing with some personal problems that expressed themselves in an unfortunate way, do we then bring the hammer down on Penny for wrongfully assuming he was some homeless wino? If not, then do we just give everyone the benefit of the doubt and lose the distinction entirely? When dealing with matters involving human life I don't know if this is a road we want to go down.
YES. Is this actually supposed to be a difficult question?
I don't think you've really thought about it if you consider such a question to be obvious.
Alright, look, my totally-serious well-considered answer is something like this: every civilization in history, before the last century or so, had an understanding that there are irredeemably useless and/or dangerous people, and found a way to dispose of them. I am not suggesting that every society in history has employed an optimal and reasonable solution to the existence of these people, nor am I suggesting that all imaginable future societies will take approaches that I would consider acceptable.
The hypothetical dystopian panopticon that arrests or punished normal citizens hundreds of times a month for utterly innocuous behavior is not a society I’d want to live in. But we have to ask ourselves: how likely is such a nightmare scenario to become reality? Isn’t it much more likely that a future society will find a middle ground somewhere in between the maximally-tolerant legal regime advocated by today’s progressive elite on the one hand, and the maximally-draconian fever dream which you may imagine the hard-right is capable of implementing?
Surely the answer to “how many arrests does it take before we declare somebody scum and he loses his basically civil rights” has some answer that you would consider reasonable? If there were a guy who’d been arrested 4,000 times, and all of them were for things you and I would both agree are antisocial and destructive, that’s someone that it’s necessary to do something about… right?
Every civilization in history, before the last century or so, was also in many many ways a really bad place to live compared to the modern West. I do not think that these two things are completely unrelated.
I totally reject this reading of history, which is probably the main reason why you and I disagree so strongly. I accept the reality of technological/medical advancement, but reject the narrative of monotonic societal/cultural improvement. I don’t think that most societies before a century ago were “really bad places to live”, especially if you weren’t a lunatic or a criminal.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Have you MET the "Karens"? They'd think the ticket machine in Demolition Man was the greatest thing ever. And there's a lot of them and many have nothing better to do than to go to city council meetings.
More options
Context Copy link
Every society had such people and was confronted with such problems. Some of them were ruled by such people and it lead to their collapse. Great Britain exiled a bunch of them to Australia and Appalachia, or just executed them. Notably its crime rate remained pretty high by modern standards, because crime is more complicated than "just kill the bad people."
I can't put a number on that with any confidence, just like you can't put a number on your nightmare scenario. I can at least say for sure that multiple powerful countries have turned into that society in the past 100 years, they've committed (and continue to commit) terrible atrocities. I can also say that worries about overbearing government aren't totally one-sided: There's plenty of right-coded worry about tyrannical and controlling governments (just look at of the discourse around covid, masks, and vaccines, or more recently 15 minute cities).
No number of arrests means that someone should lose all their civil rights. For one, as soon as you establish such a number, I think you immediately try to argue it down to be "1" or to "well they did something that isn't actually violent but is vaguely antisocial" because that's what is actually required for you to be satisfied. But also, why is one person being arrested 4,000 times? If it's because there's not actually any evidence they've committed a crime, then that sounds like the police are either incompetent or harassing the guy. If it's because he is convicted and then gets released, then that shouldn't be the case, but putting a convicted criminal in prison for longer does not require revoking civil rights.
Obviously it sucks to be victimized on the street with nothing you can do about it. It also sucks to be tackled and arrested by a power-mad cop with nothing you can do about it, or attacked on the street by a vigilante who got you confused for someone else. I's not like your (honestly, insane) idea of "execute them all" is a solution anyway, because if you could implement it you could more easily implement actually reasonable reforms.
I'm fairly certain it does, unless your entire conception of civil rights is purely procedural.
More options
Context Copy link
Like most things, criminality is partly heritable. Some people, when given freedom choose to defect against others.
Executing the most violent criminals before they reproduce over many thousands of years is artificial selection for civilisation.
You would expect it to increase the proportion of law abiding genes.
There are pretty big population difference is crime. Has anyone looked at historical time and percentage of executions for crime vs present day rates?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes? The damage to society, the ‘tragedy’, is clearly greater if an upstanding citizen dies in the chokehold than a drug-addicted homeless criminal. If you drive drunk and kill somebody the punishment is far more severe than if you just drive drunk.
Then the principle is wholly untenable. You may have edge cases like this where someone acts and you "get lucky" in a manner of speaking, but you're not going to encourage this kind of vigilantism if it requires holding the vigilante strictly liable for knowing the personal history of his target.
I am only holding people liable for the consequences of their actions. If there was minimal or no damage to society, there should not be punishment.
I guess it comes down to a preferrence: which is more important, guilty mind or guilty act?
To stretch our positions to the extreme, in total Guiltmind, a thoughtcrime would be sufficient for prison, while in total Guiltact, the sentence for accidental discharging of a firearm resulting in death would be the same as for a premeditated murder. In Guiltmind, both drunk drivers are equally guilty, and in Guiltact, one is innocent and the other guilty. Guiltact cares if the guy you just choked on the subway was an honors student or literally Hitler. Guiltmind just wants to know what you thought at the time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As I understand OP, his/her answer is no, which is why efforts to justify Penny's behavior by appealing to Neeley's record are misguided. If Penny's actions were justified -- and I don't have enough details to say one way or the other -- they can only be justified based on what he knew at the time. Hence,
People v. Minifie, 13 Cal. 4th 1055, 1068 (1996) (emphasis in original)
Edit: Note, btw, that that legal rule is based on the premise that one who kills an innocent "good" person in those circumstances lacks a criminal state of mind, ie, is not morally culpable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The easiest solution here, as far as I can tell, is to have different legal regimes for rural life vs. urban life. Let urban life be for the bug-man law-and-order types like me, with a concomitant no-nonsense legal regime, and for the rowdy teenagers and drunkards who are concerned about their mischief falling afoul of that regime, let them go mess around in the rural areas where the legal regime is designed to provide an outlet for the barbarian lifestyle. (I don’t mean barbarian in a negative way, but simply to draw a contrast between that ethos and the cosmopolitan lifestyle I prefer.)
Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in my life that would have resulted in me being killed or severely punished under the type of legal regime I’m advocating. I’ve been drunk and stupid before, but never in a way that would cause strangers to feel threatened by me; maybe that’s just because I’m small and not physically-imposing, so my drunk behavior doesn’t present as menacing even if I’m performing the same actions as you and your friends did.
I do have the “privilege” of being white and middle-class-presenting, meaning that people are far less likely to assume the worst of me than they are of someone who looks and acts like Jordan Neely; fortunately, that disparity in perception is justified by statistical reality. People really should be less scared of me than they were of Jordan Neely; if they assumed he had a long rap sheet and was capable of violence, they were right to assume that - not only because we know that it’s true, but because people who look and act like him are, statistically, far more likely to have that be true of them than people who looks and act like me are.
Considering the preferences repeatedly expressed by urban and rural residents in elections and informal communication, wouldn't it make more sense to keep rural life for "bug-man law-and-order types", and setting aside the cities for the people who are willing to tolerate the occasional subway screamer in return for having atomicity and interesting ethnic shops and occasionally getting to pat themselves on the shoulder for being enlightened and compassionate? Why do you want to live in a city to begin with? If you move to a city and want to impose a lifestyle on it that the majority of existing dwellers reject, doesn't that put you in the same category as the Islamic refugees that move to a country like Germany or France for economic reasons and then fly off the handle demanding that the locals cease their haram behaviours like having lightly clothed women waltz around in public?
("Let first-world life be for the pious Muslim types like me, with a concomitant no-nonsense moral police, and for the kaffirs and lascivious dogs who are concerned about their mischief falling afoul of that regime, let them go mess around in the desert where the legal regime is designed to provide an outlet for the barbarian lifestyle.")
More options
Context Copy link
On the other hand, assuming you're a man, you are still much more likely to be violent than much of the population. It seems to me that in order to justify your position, you have to rather arbitrarily draw a line right where it benefits you the most (you get the benefit of the doubt if you are doing something suspicious or disconcerting, but you don't have to extend the same benefit of the doubt to the group most likely to be able to harm you).
The base right of violent criminal activity is low, so even a substantially increased probability may still be low. And no, making a bad assumption and having it turn out to be correct is not right. It's lucky. Our legal system strongly discourages this form of argument--you cannot use information you did not have access to at the time in a self-defense argument, because it is very bad to encourage vigilantism with low standards. The legal system is surely far from perfect at determining guilt but it's a hell of a lot better than letting every random person off the street just decide that they think someone else did something wrong. I don't know the details of your encounters, but there are violent attacks that happen where the aggressor thinks they're completely in the right because they didn't understand the situation, or felt insulted, or think they have a right to other people's stuff, or whatever. Encouraging such behavior is likely to result in more public violence and should be a last resort at best.
This assumes that people are in one of two states: behaving in a deranged and menacing way in public, or minding their own business. That's not really the case though, there is a pretty smooth spectrum of menacing behavior people can exhibit in public.
If observers are being good basians, they will factor in the observed behavior in addition to more contextual information about a person. A well dressed white man drunkenly throwing a single strike at someone and not following it up would seem like a much bigger deal than a similarly attired 5'0" white woman doing the same to me, partially because the woman is much less physically imposing, but also because of what I know about rates of sexed violence and my guess about the likelihood of escalation to a point I couldn't easily control.
At the same time, waving a gun around is a red-alert pretty much no matter the identity of the person doing the waving.
Based on the descriptions I've seen, Jordan Neely was not actually behaving in any sort of violent way. That's why Hoffmeister has to resort to "statistical reality" about black people, to claim that agitated, annoying behavior can be construed as violent. This is not allowed as part of a legal argument for self-defense, with good reason, just like a woman walking alone can't turn around and shoot a man for following her on the public sidewalk and then make an argument about "statistical reality." A "good bayesian" can conclude anything they would like, given limited evidence, if their priors are sufficiently bad. This is why the law does not tell everyone to act like bayesians.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The legal system was perfectly fine with letting Neely (and many similarly situated) continue his one man reign of terror. Fix that, and then maybe it'll have the legitimacy to judge the Marine.
A "reign of terror"? Are you deliberately taking the piss? He's not Jack the Ripper (the marine, however, did kill someone).
Yeah, "public nuisance crimes" are not what I would call a "reign of terror." No one knew who this guy was until he was killed. An open container of alcohol in public? Turnstile hopping? This forum will get incensed over the fact the FBI uses loopholes and process crimes to punish politicians and rich celebrities who lied to said FBI, and then turn around and seriously claim that these are very legitimate crimes that prove Neely was dangerous and it was a massive failure of law and order for him to still be on the streets. I haven't found any reference to kidnapping; the only serious or violent crimes I've seen reference to are 4 assaults (over 8 years) and without knowing more about those cases, it's wildly irresponsible to jump straight from "arrested" to "definitely guilty." Like, it's entirely possible that he did commit those crimes, and others, and the DA just let him go out of misplaced sympathy. It's also possible he got into altercations with other mentally ill homeless but it's unclear who was at fault. Or that he was misidentified, or was the victim of a false accusation for being weird and noisy in public (it's totally impossible that someone could overreact to him dancing and being loud on the subway, right? that would definitely never happen?).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This just seems like a way for the Blues to visit violence on the Reds, harrying the Helots style.
The same thought occurred to me, but in this case I’m assuming that the Blues remain as averse to interpersonal violence as they currently are, and that Blues’ violent pets - people like Jordan Neely - are dealt with comprehensively and violently, rather than allowed (let alone encouraged) to run free and wreak havoc on hapless Reds. And I’m also assuming that in this scenario Reds are permitted to be armed to the teeth in order to guard against incursions from undesirables who push their luck.
This is not a term that conforms to our engagement rules. Its antagonistic in its assumptions, and doesn't even seem necessary within the context.
More options
Context Copy link
How does arming rural citizens to the teeth help here? You already said that people in rural areas should be given special treatment (for what reason, I don't know, since rural meth heads are just as obnoxious as urban ones in my experience), so you have to give them special treatment. A guy with a shotgun willing to shoot anyone who enters onto his property has even less opportunity to evaluate if the person he's shooting fits into one of the special categories you seem willing to create wherein people are given a free pass to violate laws that ostensibly apply to everybody. If it becomes clear that antisocial behavior is tolerated beyond a certain line then ne'er do wells will have an incentive to go there and urban leaders will have an incentive to make sure they go there, especially progressive ones who don't want to put them in jail.
It wouldn't even be a progressive thing, necessarily. Exiling your ne'er do wells is just good sense- it solves the problem more semi-permanently and is much cheaper than jailing them. Apartheid SA and the USSR both tended to deal with petty criminals by dropping them off in rural areas and not caring very much what happened.
If the best examples you can come up with are the USSR and apartheid-era SA you may want to rethink your argument.
They were extremely different regimes that independently arrived at the same conclusion.
More options
Context Copy link
To disprove hydro's examples you must show the bad aspects of those regimes are necessary requirements for their low petty crime rate OR that their petty crime rate wasn't actually low.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
From the Guardian:
homelessness as well as mental health struggles after his mother’s murder when he was a teenager.
Auron MacIntyre is correct. This attempt to frame it as a white vigilante against a BLACK talented dancer experiencing homelessness through no fault of his own is just about the perfect illustration of progressive stack ideology and the extent to which it makes the absolute dregs of society into objects of veneration.
More options
Context Copy link
Because they’re intelligent, talented, and public-spirited individuals whose skills and disposition can and should be directed toward prosocial ends.
Yes, these people should be lustrated and disallowed from practicing law or having any position of influence in our civilization moving forward.
Antifa draws its membership, at least at the street level, from the dregs of society. People who are defective and incapable of fitting into civilized society. I don’t care what happens to them, but I’m not particularly bothered that it will probably not end well for them.
More options
Context Copy link
Penny applied a form of restraint that obviously can very easily lead to death instead of applying any of many other kinds of restraints that just lock the person's arms and/or legs and so pose almost no threat of killing the other person.
I have been in fights before and so I know that in the heat of the moment one does not think clearly about exactly what one wants to try to do to the other person. So I don't judge Penny in that sense.
The question for me boils down to, was Neely actually attacking other people when Penny attacked him.
Chokehold isn't the same thing as choking. He wasn't choking him outright, supposedly the incident took 15 minutes.
I guess he messed up, although it's just possible like St. Floyd with his drug habit and severe heart issues, Neely just wasn't a healthy guy due to being a homeless drug abuser.
We might learn something from the autopsy perhaps.
More options
Context Copy link
I think folks should recognize that a crowd trying to restrain someone will end badly a certain percentage of the time, regardless of whether neck restraints are used. Violence is random like that -- people don't die when they should, others die when they shouldn't. Some just drop dead from the stress. Add the extreme exhaustion of fighting for ones life, a person who would otherwise survive might not be able adjust their position to breathe adequately. Like with drowning, the death process and mechanism might not be obvious to observers.
Right, which is why you shouldn't escalate a confrontation unless it's necessary to prevent imminent violence. If this guy was about the attack someone and he intervened imperfectly then it's self defense gone wrong. If he was simply spouting profanities and throwing (non-injurious) trash then the person who decide to escalate the confrontation to physical violence shoulders the legal risks of that violence going wrong.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Amusingly enough, there is a sentiment in much of the alt right, from the likes of Vox Day and even our own @KulakRevolt, that is basically "Yup, if you're small and weak, suck it up and endure whatever your more powerful superiors choose to inflict upon you. It sucks to suck."
Your power fantasies are just that, the revenge fantasies of every bullied nerd ever, the copes of someone telling himself he's smarter and better and "biologically superior" to the jocks picking on him.
Now, I say this not out of a lack of sympathy for your experience (I am hardly a Batman or Punisher myself), or even disagreement with your central point (that it's terrible that we allow schizophrenic homeless losers to threaten people because we don't have the political will to do something about them, especially when they're black). But to point out that basically, you're not complaining that it's bad for the strong to dominate the weak. You're just complaining that the current social order doesn't put you among the strong.
This is a gross mischaracterization.
I have always said "Yup, if you're small and weak, suck it up and endure whatever your more powerful superiors choose to inflict upon you. It sucks to suck. SO become strong, figure out your more powerful enemies weaknesses, and achieve victory so you can inflict 10-fold violence upon them in VENGEANCE"
My Gospel is one of hatred and violence. Not resignation.
More options
Context Copy link
This was more antagonistic than it needed to be.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not super familiar with the alt right but I don't know if your characterization is what I'd agree with... Speaking as a white american with lots of red tribe relatives (not alt right, I know, so maybe it's not the same) but basically they're all scared and know they're weak compared with black and brown people (don't know how else to say it), their ideology is not "if you're small and weak suck it up" but rather "I know I'm small and weak and so will try to make myself more able to defend myself and try to stop being as small and weak so I buy guns and defend myself and hopefully become more powerful than minorities even though if we were all naked in the forest my family and I would be fucking screwed"
I'm guessing the alt right operates on this same idea on some level.
More options
Context Copy link
Is the alt-right position on strong-versus-weak prescriptive or descriptive? Is it that the strong should dominate the weak, or merely that they do?
I'm asking because I do not know the alt-right very well.
More options
Context Copy link
The irony is that the alt right is itself small and weak, and has had to endure whatever its more powerful superiors have chosen to inflict upon it.
Is the irony that this proves their point? I don't see the alt right as seeing themselves as weak, if anything they see themselves as victims of more aggressive populations but maybe I'm conflating the alt right with the rural whites I know personally
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'd like to point out that in a lawless world of all-against-all OP would probably win a fight against any insane pauper, no matter how burly or experienced with violence. All he would need to do is buy a gun and shoot anyone who tries to get close to him. The homeless man probably can't afford a gun and ammunition.
The advantage of people who are good at one-on-one violence is artificial. It's created by a society that punishes people who win fights by inflicting deadly injury, but doesn't punish people who harass with low-level violence and intimidation.
In every previous era of our species, the military state of the art favored social deadly force over antisocial harassment. Two hundred years ago that dancer would have been sent to a prison or workhouse to die a miserable death. Five hundred years ago he would have been hanged. Two thousand years ago he would have been enslaved by the state and worked to death in a silver mine. Ten thousand years ago a gang of 4-10 men would have encountered him, perceived him as a threat, and thrown rocks at him until he died.
This man's ability to have any power at all in a public setting has nothing to do with his strength and everything to do with our mercy.
I like the division of labor, and to a great degree the monopolization of violence by the state too. I like that I can trust other people to build my house, to make my shoes and to brew my beer, much better than it would be done if I did it myself. So, I'm ok with the state delivering the necessary violence to keep the peace by means of professionally trained men and not by myself having to do it (of course, there are exceptional situations where it's not applicable). The tragedy of the woke society is that it keeps the separation of powers where the citizens delegate keeping of peace to the state, but reneges on the promise of peace being kept, telling the citizens that due to past and present sins (mainly having to do with their skin color) they do not actually deserve any peace. This looks a lot like fraud. If I paid for shoes, I want good shoes, not crudely made wooden blocks and a lecture about how slaves two centuries ago had it worse. If we as a society agreed to have the police, I want it to deliver the peace. Unfortunately, more frequently than not it doesn't happen. And, even more unfortunately, the inhabitants of these places - numerous, often educated and wealthy people - seem to be unwilling to do anything to change it (often willing to do much to make it worse). I'm not sure how to fix this situation and whether the fix is possible at all.
More options
Context Copy link
Absolutely true.
I also feel similar to the OP. The difference is that I’m a large, very muscular and physically dominant male. I’m an amateur boxer & powerlifter and have been in a few situations where I’ve had to use the skills I’ve developed in adverse conditions.
I’ve lived and worked principally in two cities in my life. Both very blue. One very wealthy and safe but with the growing problems that are discussed here frequently. We will call it city A. Other city much less wealthy, much rougher and with a longer history of violence. Let’s call that city B. Both cities are relatively close tk each other.
Over the last ten years the homeless in city A have gotten increasingly violent, brazen and deranged. They started setting up camps in broad daylight, in the middle of public streets. often the most violently mentally will walk the streets at day and terrify people.
The homeless in city b, while numerous, are largely the same as they’ve even been. They mostly keep to themselves, sometimes annoy tourists, but they are rarely threatening.
While city B has a reputation for violence, I feel much more comfortable there. I once expressed this to a group of people from city A, who were a bit shocked and amused. They asked me why. I told them their homeless are crazy, aggressive and out of control. They asked me why I thought that. I paused for a moment, and said ”If homeless people act like in city B, I think people just beat the shit out of them.”.
I myself had an illustrative example of this personally. Late at night in city A, where I was working, a homeless man locked eyes with me and then took a shit right in front of me.
After the momentary disgust wore off, the rage at this blatant antisocial act set in. I look up, see a security camera staring right at me, looked back at the homeless man, gave him a death stare, and moved on.
I think there are a lot of people feeling like Bernie Goetz out there, but with our growing panopticon and our fully deranged racial politics, that juice is just not worth the squeeze.
so what, you wanted to rage out on some loser who was street shitting, but the all seeing eye prevented you from... what exactly? The guy wasn't shitting on your property, and while it's gross it isn't exactly some rando's wheelhouse to defend the streets from shit.
From where i'm standing i'd rather live in a place where vigilantism is more harshly policed than shitting without a toilet. Vile as it may be, a pile of shit can be safely sidestepped whereas angry men with spurious reasoning can't always be. Obviously in the OP case with the marine, the street shitter WAS the violent man with questionable mental faculties, but without the loud violent shouting a street shitter isn't a good cause for someone to start fantasizing about violence IMO.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Our system -- or at least the NYC system -- is worse than that. It not only allows physically strong violent criminals to dominate weak people. It requires that physically strong decent people allow physically strong violent criminals to dominate weak people. And to a large extent it requires that physically strong decent people allow even weaker violent criminals to dominate them. Because if you fight and lose you go to the hospital; if you fight and win you go to jail. Any indignity or harm visited upon you that is less bad than spending time at Central Booking, it is a no-brainer to just accept. If it's worse than time at Central Booking but less bad than time at Riker's Island, you're very probably better off just accepting it.
The theory, of course, is that this is a civilized society and the police will handle it. But if nobody's hurt badly, the police and the system will do nothing. If someone is hurt, the response won't be enough to deter the behavior; this guy had over 40 arrests. So this is government as dog-in-the-manger; they're sitting on the option of violence, but they won't do anything with it.
The stuff about the sanctity of life, "let the police handle it", "it's not worth killing someone over" sounds great in the ivory tower, somewhat less great underground.
More options
Context Copy link
The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must? Not to talk for either of the aforementioned 'alt right' guys mentioned, but that sentiment is generally uttered as a description, not a prescription. And what generally follows is some opining on what should be done given we recognize it as true. So I'm not sure what your contention with that truth would be considering we just witnessed a black hobo who had enjoyed being 'strong' in the NYC subway arena get challenged and taken out by someone who is now facing the consequences for not recognizing the true strength of the black hobo, which lies in the social realm some very 'fine' jews and Americans have constructed for everyone to enjoy.
For instance, considering where the prescriptive part of the 'might makes right' philosophy comes into play, when it's me and my neurotypical non-assaulting homies on the subway vs the 'schizophrenic crime commitment squad' then I don't think we are drawing any lines in the sand that are too morally complex. With full recognition that I am not a black hobo, so I'm obviously taking my own side here, what exactly is the alternative? Wait for another Asian grandma to be pushed on the tracks? Live under the tyranny of the self proclaimed king of the subway car, who psychologically torments you for his own enjoyment? You can do that, and it is in fact being enforced as we speak. But since no one sane likes that, who should be strong?
In fact it surprises me to hear you point this out since it's a very popular argument for the types of people who dislike the 'alt right' types to go to when the 'alt right' types make their group preferences known. Which generally goes something like: ''ethnic group' commits a lot of crime, we should do something about that' Followed by the retort of: 'Why are you hating 'ethnic group'? If you don't like them because they commit too much crime, shouldn't you just hate criminals instead?'
But apparently, if you do hate the criminal, you are just a pathetic dweeb with a power fantasy? So therefor RIP Asian granny, the black hobo will now sing you the song of his people as he pushes you onto the train tracks? I don't get it.
It seems to me you are just calling Hoffmeister25 low status so therefor he shouldn't dare voice his feelings on the matter.
I'm getting to this post second, even though I modded a downthread comment of yours. I'll mostly just reiterate my ending point. When you make every other topic about jewish people you are waging the culture war. You probably need to take a personal break from that topic or risk escalating bans.
More options
Context Copy link
Is there anything you don't blame on Jews?
This is a willful misreading. I agree with pretty much everyone that a schizophrenic homeless career criminal getting his ticket punched after harassing one too many people is no tragedy. My objection is to making it a racial grievance (which includes sideswipes at Da Joos). But I also think there are reasons we should not be eager to embrace vigilante justice, and my observation that you cannot control which end of the pointy stick you'll be on was quite straightforward.
Your power fantasies are just that, the revenge fantasies of every bullied nerd ever, the copes of someone telling himself he's smarter and better and "biologically superior" to the jocks picking on him.
I can't read this statement to mean anything else. Maybe I'm retarded. Or maybe I'm just not a bullied nerd so I can identify with a lot of fantasizing, coping and seething due to perceived injustice without framing those fantasies through stereotypical jew Hollywood movie tropes about insecurities and the 'revenge of the nerds against the jocks'.
I didn't say you found it a tragedy or in any other way sympathetic. My point was that you are not answering the question pertaining to 'might makes right'. Either the schizos rule the subway or someone else. The police won't do anything about it, so what's the less wrong angle here? Sit in silence as yet another Asian granny goes on the rails? Your observation on being careful of the pointy sticks has long become irrelevant. There are pointy sticks. Now what do we do about them? Not in the abstract, not in theory. We know where schizo supremacy leads. Are we so certain that if otherwise law abiding citizens stand up for themselves against this tyranny without getting crushed by the system that we will have worse outcomes? I sincerely doubt it.
There are Jewish people that use this forum, and writing about "jew Hollywood" is too antagonistic and boo-outgroup to be thrown out as an undefended sentence. And before you go on a rant, this statement is equally applicable to your post:
There are [group] people that use this forum, and writing about "[group] Hollywood" is too antagonistic and boo-outgroup to be thrown out as an undefended sentence.
You are allowed to not like other groups, we don't moderate on beliefs. But trying to carry the flag for that cause in every other discussion is waging the culture war. You are waging the culture war here, and we don't like that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a very fair point and I absolutely don’t deny that a healthy civilization embraces hierarchy and allows the strong and the virtuous to impose their will upon the weak and the degenerate. My complaint here is that the structures of society that cultivate virtue and coordinate the actions of the strong in order to direct their actions toward the benefit and protection of the weak have broken down; in their absence, the strong are instead incentivized to act privately and purely for their own individual self-interest, and the weak are preyed upon instead of protected.
I am someone with a lot to offer society, but only if society creates the conditions that allow me to not need to engage in interpersonal violence in order to function. I have little to no interest in the libertarian ethos of self-reliance and rugged manly individualism; I acknowledge that this is good and healthy for certain people, and I want there to be outlets for them to express and experience that lifestyle, but count me among the people who thrive under precisely the “bug-man” strictures that such people are chafing against.
I do want and need the state to have my back and protect me; I would prefer the state not to be a nanny state, but rather a daddy state, where we send men who look like Daniel Penny to take out the trash, rather than sending nurturing female social workers to coddle and enable the Jordan Neelys of the world. I want the strong to be on my side, and to enact violence against the “weak” - in this case, the morally weak and the useless - on my behalf and in the service of a society that benefits both the Virtuous Strong and the Useful Weak.
Deep down in places we don't talk about at parties, we want him on that subway. We need him on that subway.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this leans in the right direction from the previous poster but perhaps too far. They think that they already are "the strong" it's just for some peculiar political eddy the weak are given limited local situations where they can exercise a limited kind of crude power. It's difficult to model homeless schitzos as actually powerful rather than circumstantially able to exercise power because the State doesn't equally enforce the rules on everyone.
True enough. But "A homeless black guy harassed me, this is why I wish we could go all Turner Diaries" is the direction I see.
Outrage at being bullied and essentially rendered helpless by a criminal psychopath in public is understandable, but all the stuff about "large, high-testosterone, social and biological inferiors" is just racial seething.
The guy was gutter trash, same as any number of whites I've known.
More options
Context Copy link
I’m not saying he’s my social and biological inferior because he’s black. He’s my social inferior because he’s a destructive parasite, incapable of contributing positively to society, constantly taking from those around him; he’s my biological inferior because he’s schizophrenic. His brain is incurably defective, and that condition is heritable and makes him a danger to others.
I don’t know how you got The Turner Diaries out of anything I’ve said; I do not advocate mass violence against non-criminal black individuals, and never have. We have hundreds of thousands of white bums, schizos, and scumbags in this country, and I advocate precisely the same treatment for them.
Yeah, me and my family are non-white so I have a pretty direct material interest in opposing the advances of white nationalism.
But this is like the “predator bro handshake meme” if I’ve ever seen one in real life. All the people I know who are most hardline about this type of stuff are Latino, Asian & African immigrants. Which really shouldn’t surprise anyone, seeing as they are the ones actually suffering the consequences of the urban decay brought on by violent, mentally ill homeless.
And they know the results of Anarcho-Tyranny as they come from so many similar places; doubtful they want their refuge to turn into the same as they knew.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Schizophrenia can't be cured (yet) but it certainly can be managed in many (perhaps a majority) of cases.
I think you're making a lot of assumptions and leaps of logic here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I definitely agree, and I am also baffled sometimes that more of the smart types with those opinions don't just start hitting the gym. Healthy body, healthy mind and being muscular has all sorts of advantages with practically no drawback besides a couple hours a week during which you can get your motte posting in.
I don't disagree with the advice in general, but specifically here, being physically fit can also lead you to a false sense of security.
There's a reason every single 'street fight' guru tells you to run away every single time if you can. Even if you are in shape, even if you know how to fight, you are potentially one moment away from a knife in an artery, just to name a single life ending risk out of a thousand.
Sure, but even insane and belligerent people are more careful around big people.
Deterring fights by being physically imposing (or at least not being the inverse) is a useful complement to running away if a fight actually happens.
To both you and @aqouta , I feel like you are missing the point. You are still helpless sitting in the subway car whilst some maniac, hopefully I guess, molests someone else. 'Feeling like you could take them' is, again, just a false sense of security. Hoping that they will see you alone because you believe you look swole is, again, just a false sense of security. The actual problem, the schizo in the subway car, is still there. Feeling confident about your chances of not being the unlucky one to catch his attention, knife or a bullet is completely irrelevant to the actual problem.
Not saying this applies to either of you, but it feels like there is this sentiment dominating this thread of conversation that hinges on the idea that physically fit or fight capable people don't have power fantasies, or don't feel the constraints of society around them when faced with potentially physical altercations. They do. But the more smart or experienced of them usually recognize that choking out the schizo on the subway is a very risky thing. Not just in the moment but every moment after that. You kick the schizos ass and then what? Wait for him to find you on your regular commute? Ah, the schizo lunatic is holding a grudge against me, what a great spot to be in.
I can't stress enough, again, the feeling of security you get from having a high opinion of yourself is always liable to be false. You might be helping yourself improve your chances if you ever are unlucky enough get into a bad spot, but you are not getting away from all the other things that weigh everyone down anyways. Not to sound to bellicose but it's literally a cope.
Sure but that was not my point. My point was that being physically imposing causes people to not fuck with you, even insane and violent people. This isn't about my confidence, it's about theirs. It's about whether they feel that they could take me.
Me being large confers an advantage to me but as you state it's smaller than one might imagine and any individual violent encounter carries an unacceptably large risk. Making people not wanting to start altercations is therefore useful, regardless of whether their assessment of your capacity to defend yourself is accurate or not.
Its not that I can kick the shit out of the schitzo lunatic because I am large, it's that I don't have to because I am.
More options
Context Copy link
We've moved a good distance from where I originally, as an aside, expressed how I thought it was strange that many smart people do not see the obvious boons of becoming strong. Only a small facet of those boons is being mostly left alone by crazy people. I was very much not saying "just get buff and there is no problem, lol" so much as "this is another example of why I think everyone should make themselves more fit. There is a sense, and one I saw somewhat in the OP that raw strength is beneath a sense of personal excellence that I find wrongheaded.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Right, I wasn't meaning to imply being strong to actually get into fights with bums, but even crazy bums tend to leave the bigger guys alone. At least this is my experience from going from a slightly chubby nerd to a fairly buff man over ~6 years in Chicago.
This matches my observation, which is one reason that I question just how crazy the bums are. I mean, sure, they obviously have self-destructive personalities, are frequently addicted to narcotics, and have extremely poor impulse control, but I think people are entirely too willing to accept the idea that this is about schizophrenia or that the gentleman in the subway was "having a mental health crisis". Maybe he's just, in the colloquial sense, a complete asshole. If a given belligerent vagrant is suffering more from just being a complete asshole than being mentally ill, I would expect them to exercise some degree of discretion when picking targets to harass for fun and profit, which seems more consistent with what I actually see. There's a continuum here as well as significant group overlap between those groups.
I agree that a lot of the cases of random attacks are just stupidity (sometimes drug-induced, sometimes not) interacting with being an asshole / wanting to fight, but I don't think the 'avoiding big people' is good evidence against it. "Don't directly challenge large enemies" is a fairly old instinct that almost every living thing that moves has, if despite meth mania you have enough instincts left to perceive where other people are and fight them, you probably have enough left to avoid 6'4 270lb powerlifter bubba
More options
Context Copy link
Even animals recognize big and imposing as something to steer clear of, so I'm not sure it's evidence against being mentally unwell that they prefer to pick on women, old people, and small people.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's no good hitting the gym if you go to Riker's for popping the overly aggressive homeless beggar (for the sake of argument we'll say he was hitting or shoving you, but ineffectively) right in the nose. The law says you have to walk away or take it, not respond.
It has been my experience that crazy people do not fuck with buff dudes, or at least do so significantly less than others.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I go to the gym 4-5 times a week, but the results I get have not yet given me the physical tools I would need to contend with a large schizophrenic man with a nearly boundless capacity for brutal violence. I’ve thought about starting a regime of steroids, testosterone supplements, etc. in order to help me see better results, but I’m concerned about what the knock-on effects would be on the other parts of my life.
Within around 3 years of starting a 5 day a week schedule you should be visibly stronger than most people. No real need for steroids unless you're very time sensitive.
That's unnecessarily hardcore imo.
Going 3 times a week consistently for 3 years is more than enough, if you actually apply yourself when you're in the gym. A lot of people seem to just amble around and don't increase the weight sufficiently.
This is almost-certainly part of my problem.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm one of those who believe that this is a tragedy stemming from the end of forced institutionalization and the demise of law and order. This guy could have been alive being looked after and kept away from normies.
There does seem to be a cold new strain of secular right that just sees the guy as a worthless meat sack who shouldn't even exist. Seemingly confirming the progressive suspicion that the right would rather see whole swaths of humanity simply genocided.
On the one hand the right talks about upholding civilization, but the blase attitude regarding mediating institutions and recovering a government that was makes me think a primitive vigilante-ism strain that is quite anti-civilization is taking hold. A thrill of the idea of taking things into their own hands. Perhaps a kind of Fight Club style fascination with the manhood-testing the follows from the collapse of it all. An actual disappointment at 1955 law enforcement returning. The 1955 justice system would not just kill the guy. It was not that vicious. (You could say after 40 prior arrests it would...but Neely would never have gotten to 40 prior arrests. He'd have been put away permanently.)
The problem here is that mass incarceration of the 'humane' variety isn't a realistic option. I mean, you can try to have a cordoned off village or facility filled with deranged schizophrenics but it won't last very long. These guys need constant supervision. If you don't want them burning things down or tormenting one another, usually the weakest and most vulnerable, then you are looking at very high costs.
Coming from a part of the Nordic world that is considered to treat their mentally ill in the most humane possible way, the system in place is constantly teetering on the edge of falling apart. It can not afford any higher ratios of mentally ill entering society. Even now there are a host of mentally ill people locked in jail for little other reason than a lack of other facilities to house them. The others are kept at facilities that house the criminally insane. The semi-functional ones are homeless. Benefitting immensely from the small scope of the homeless problem, they can be periodically checked on. If that wasn't the case the problem would get a lot worse.
Considering a Nordic country can barely handle the problem with it's relatively comfortable population, I don't see America finding any solutions.
High costs compared to the chicken feed allocated to social programs, or compared to the Pentagon budget?
Where I live there is practically no military spending. The budget issue is centered around balancing debt with all the other things people rely on, like general healthcare. We could, instead of building a new hospital, just expand the facilities for the mentally ill. But there is an obvious cost there. Personally, I would much rather take the hospital and more doctors since there is a dire need for both.
I am sure the US is in a much worse spot than where I'm from. And could benefit from trimming a lot of the fat off the Pentagon pig, but my point was that even a Nordic model state could not fit the population proportions that the US had to deal with. Simply put, there are, proportionally, too many socially unfit. I am sure there is a solution or a fix that can better the situation by a lot. But unless people are willing to sacrifice some of their own safety and quality of life, I don't see a 'humane' solution like is often imagined existing somewhere in Europe.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To note, America has a much higher mentally ill population.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To be very clear, I am a hardcore proponent of law and order, and I strongly desire a society where Daniel Penny would never have had to do what he did, because it wouldn’t have gotten to that point. I don’t hunger for an era of vigilantism and wanton interpersonal violence; there’s a reason that I’ve made it into my thirties without ever engaging in a single act of interpersonal violence. While I do believe that war and combat can be ennobling for some men under certain circumstances, I’m largely in agreement with you that the reduction of violence in favor of civilization has been, on balance, a significant improvement for mankind.
However, I do sincerely believe that the long-term maintenance of society does in fact depend on the application of severe violence by the state toward certain individuals within society. Treating schizophrenic repeat-offending criminals as “people who need help” is a cancerous attitude which will erode - and already has eroded - civilization. No, he did not “need help” and he did not deserve help; he was a useless scumbag, a burden on every other person around him, and we are better off without him in every possible way. I agree with you that it’s far from ideal that random strangers had to take matters into their own hands to do to Jordan Neely what the state should have already done, in a way that would have been legitimized by the imprimatur of state sovereignty and monopoly on violence. Somebody needed to permanently remove Jordan Neely from society, and if it’s not going to be the state - which, clearly, given the state of our civilization, it wasn’t going to be - the next best thing is 24-year-old former Marines.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You only need to believe that it would've been better that Mr Schizo was miraculously cured of schizoism enough to not attack people in order to honestly say "no, I didn't want him to die".
Why aim so low? Why not believe that it would've been better that Mr Schizo was miraculously cured and is nobel nominated physicist?
Neither of those scenarios appear to be on offer.
Because it's a minimal preferred alternative to "violently remove him from society".
Isn't housed / committed in a secure psychiatric hospital more minimal than miraculous cure?
That would fall under "violently removed from society".
For you committed to a secure unit and shot or choked as an enemy of the state is the same?
It's in the same class of responses.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link